Instead, white audiences typically explained that, since a black person was inherently incapable of such artistry, the spectacular music pouring from Blind Tom's fingertips did not originate inside Tom, but instead came from some supernatural source outside Tom whose black body was merely the music's borrowed "vessel. Perhaps the greatest injustice of Blind Tom's career was that, given the racism of the times, few if any of his myriad white fans-not even Mark Twain who once caught Tom's act three nights in a row-considered the African American musician as truly possessing any musical talent, much less genius, of his own. Long after the 1865 abolition of slavery, the adult pianist, now also thrilling audiences in Europe, remained largely in thrall of his white managers, one of whom had the courts declare the moneymaking Blind Tom his "idiot" ward. This is the incredible moment Lucy, a 13-year-old who is blind and neurodiverse, played a highly-complex Chopin piece, leaving MikaSounds and LangLang speechless. Jude Kofie, an 11-year-old autistic child from Aurora, CO with a natural affinity for music, couldn’t believe it when a 45,000 grand piano was delivered to his house. Wharton Music Center features Jazz Piano Prodigy Aaron Diehl as part of its continuing Library Concert Series on Thursday, May 21, at 7:00 p.m. The Prodigy are a Braintree, Essex, UK, electronic music group (aka Prodigy), formed by Liam Howlett (composition, keyboards), in 1990. Predictably, while the white businessmen made handsome profits-even riches-the African American star attraction for his grueling performances got little more than room and board. As the 13-year-old sits down at the piano and begins to play, Lang Lang looks to his fellow judge in awe. After discovering in an 1857 experiment how his enslaved child prodigy could fill a rented auditorium with enthusiastic paying audiences, Colonel Bethune soon was regularly "hiring out" Tom to various concert promoters who booked Blind Tom in hundreds of packed halls from coast to coast. Soon the slave boy was allowed to improvise on his master's piano and, taught some basics by awed instructors, was creating his own original musical compositions.Įxploitation of Blind Tom's musical genius emerged early and proved a major theme of the pianist's five-decade career. One day after listening to the Bethune children's piano lessons, Tom himself took the keyboard and astounded the family by reproducing their notes from memory. Born in antebellum Georgia to an enslaved couple named Wiggins, Tom, who in infancy showed an uncanny ability to mimic sounds of nature, as a toddler first showed his musical genius in the Bethune plantation house where his mother labored.
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